Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer, John Clare and me*

A long time ago in the days when I earned money as a writer and editor and did my research not on the internet but in libraries (among other places), I came across a fascinating book. It was called The Englishman’s Flora (rather unfortunately, but those were sexist days – even more so than now) and it listed all the country names for wildflowers as well as some of the folklore associated with them. It was a big beautiful hardback, available for reference only.

This summer, when I was inspired to write about my passion for wildflowers – because it was a beautiful summer, because walking in the countryside was mostly what I did and because Kate of the blog I live, I love, I craft, I am me took an interest in my blog and gave me confidence, I looked out for the book again and discovered that it now lived in the library’s ‘stack’ – that mysterious dusty cellar where old books went to die – and that it could actually be ordered and borrowed. So I borrowed it.

Original version

It was, I found, first published in 1955 and is not even listed on Amazon. A second-hand 1987 reprint on the other hand is listed as ‘from £430’. And I had the original in my hands. What’s more, because of the on/off Lockdown, I could keep it for as long as I liked (unless someone else wanted it which didn’t seem very likely). Libraries are wonderful places.

1987 version

I looked into the author too, which was the poet Geoffrey Grigson, husband of the cookery writer Jane Grigson and father of Sophie Grigson, cookery writer and occasional television cook. He’d also written a book called Samuel Palmer: the Visionary Years. I borrowed that too because I knew that Samuel Palmer, a painter, had lived for a time in the village where I was brought up – Shoreham in Kent. It turned out that those visionary years were his time in my village. I wasn’t surprised, but at the same time none of his pictures conveyed the place to me. The colours were wrong for a start.

A painting of Shoreham by Samuel Palmer

Then, a week ago, I borrowed a book of Geoffrey Grigson’s called Poems of John Clare’s Madness, both because I’m fascinated (and terrified) by madness and because of my interest in John Clare. As I said in my recent post ‘May every cage be open’, John Clare is known for his nature poetry and for the madness caused by separation from the countryside of his childhood. I could relate to that, seeing as mine is now the M25, but I didn’t know how I knew that about him and felt that I ought to find out for myself. (And both GG and I are using the word ‘madness’ in its English sense of ‘insanity’, not the American one of ‘anger’. Incidentally, this applies to the title of my blog as well.)

John Clare aged 27 

John Clare in a mental asylum, aged 51

Then, although I don’t normally read poetry, I thought I might read some of John Clare’s, and I started with the one whose title leapt out at me. I loved it and reproduce it here for you. (As far as I know, it’s not in copyright but if you disagree do please let me know.) Amazingly, it was written while he was in the mental asylum where he spent 28 years.

Clare hated punctuation apparently and fought with his editors. I hated the punctuation in the printed poem and so have taken the ENORMOUS liberty of removing or changing nearly all of it. I've also taken out some of the capital letters, especially those at the beginning of lines, because to me they were unnecessary and misleading. (One day I ought to try and look at Clare's original manuscripts, if they exist.)  

I Am

I am, yet what I am none cares or knows

My friends forsake me like a memory lost
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
They rise and vanish in oblivious host
like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes
and yet I am, and live like vapours tost.
 
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise
into the living sea of waking dreams
where there is neither sense of life or joys
but the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems,
even the dearest that I love the best
are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.
 
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
a place where woman never smiled or wept
there to abide with my creator, God
and sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
untroubling and untroubled where I lie - 
the grass below, above the vaulted sky.

                        John Clare (1793-1864)

*The ‘and me’ bit in this title is partly an ironic nod to the current fashion for adding it to the title of every television programme. I'd hate you to think I was conceited.

Some small good things

As I struggle with winter darkness, a family in Kent and London thrown into disarray by the latest restrictions, and a bad back which arrived mysteriously on 23 December as I relaxed for Christmas, I thought I’d share with you some small good things which have come into my life recently.
 

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we went for a walk along our nearby canal. On the way we passed this solar farm . . .

Solar farm, glimpsed through trees from the canal towpath

. . . and I noticed that sheep were grazing among the panels (but unfortunately didn’t take a picture of them). That’s interesting I thought: making double use of the land frees up space which could perhaps be filled with wildness.

And then I noticed that a biggish area of land outside the perimeter fence of the solar farm but within the old field boundary had been left to go wild.

Around the solar farm: an area of scrub and rough grass

It looked as if the wildness was accidental – through neglect rather than by design – but none the worse for that. Better, perhaps. It was just my sort of place.

And then I noticed underneath a distant tree the figures of some deer.

Deer colonising the wilderness 

It was a magical moment. It showed that as soon as there’s space, nature moves in. It takes no time at all.

An hour later we came back the same way and the deer were still there, comfortable and unafraid.

An hour later, the deer are still there, in exactly the same place

Christmas Day

Christmas Day arrived cold and frosty. Perfect seasonal weather, with a glorious sunrise which felt like an omen. I snapped a picture quickly through the landing window.

Christmas Day sunrise from the landing window

A few minutes later I went outside and took another picture, but I think the one from the landing is better.

Christmas Day sunrise from the garden

May every cage be open

Two years ago, I renewed my acquaintance with Norway, the land of my mother’s mother (see right), and one of the many things I loved about that beautiful land was its wildness. And not just wildness: I discovered that the whole of the mountainous, wooded, laked interior is common land, where you are free to roam, camp, ski, picnic, swim.
 
Britain used to be like that too, until the thirteenth century when powerful people began to appropriate the countryside for themselves, ‘enclosing’ and fencing it and excluding everyone else. And the process continues, in ways both big (like roads and housing estates) and small.
 
When we first came to live in our current house over forty years ago, two farmers owned most of the land around and – with amazing kindness - let me wander where I liked. Now the land is broken up, with hedges fenced (instead of patched with old bedsteads, pallets and cattle feeders that I could climb over) and gates padlocked and the areas where I can walk reducing every day. What’s more, I get shouted at for walking on the road.
 
The poet John Clare went mad when the Northamptonshire countryside where he was born and brought up was cleared for intensive farming and shut off to the common people. George Monbiot in a superb article (in the Guardian in 2012) likens this process to the way indigenous peoples are torn from their land and culture, and their souls destroyed.
 
I feel the same sometimes and, before I get into one of my rants, I thought I’d share with you my collection of pictures on the subject. At the end of which, I will try to produce a happy ending. Promise. 

My current hope for the future is rewilding – allowing large areas of land to revert to their natural state, bringing back flora and fauna once extinct in this country like beavers and storks, removing fences, letting rivers take their own course, letting drained marshlands flood again. Returning the countryside to a richness and diversity we can hardly imagine now. And then joining up these areas, so that richness and diversity are the norm.

I can only hope that we humans are allowed back too to these wild lands.

And here to finish is a picture of a van I saw in Glastonbury - that bastion of human diversity.

It's worth following the link to mobiusloop.co.uk. Is this their van? The small print (bottom right) reads 'Mortimer Sparrow' and 'the vanishing green art'. It's worth following this as well. As far as I can gather, Mortimer is a 'vegan tattoo artist' who also paints pictures. She has a facebook page, I think (but I don't, so I couldn't check properly).

Calendar: The stories behind the pictures

With the encouragement of my lovely aunt in Norway (thank you, lovely aunt) and with advice from Alan and Cathy who present us with a beautiful handmade calendar each year (thank you, Alan and Cathy), I’ve put together a calendar for next year (2021) using my photographs of Devon countryside.

Because some of the recipients will be Norwegian, I've also prepared some background information about the pictures - such as more about their locations, and what was happening in Britain at the time (given that this has been a fairly extraordinary year). I was going to mail it out with the calendars but then I thought that this might steal the limelight from my aunt when she donated calendars to her friends as Christmas presents, and I couldn't work out how the heck to please both the British and the Norwegian recipients without either patronising people or boring them. So I decided to put the information here instead (and direct people here from the calendar) so that people can read it only if they want to and British people will understand why I'm including a lot that's obvious to them. I hope you'll be interested even if you don't have a calendar.

Phew.

Some of the pictures have already been published in this blog but others are new. The links refer to posts about the walks where the pictures were taken, and if you follow them you might also come across the pictures that got away (as recounted below).

The stories behind the pictures

Devon is in South-West England. When I arrived here in the 1970s, it was rural and unspoilt and different from the rest of the country, but its population has doubled since then and much has changed. It took the Lockdown in spring and summer to remind me what the area used to be like.

Frog is who I’m married to (and I bear no responsibility for his nickname since he was given it before I met him). Ellie is a ten-year-old Springer Spaniel/Border Collie cross who’s lived with us since she was a puppy. She’s very bossy and very energetic, and barks a lot which drives Frog demented.

Pictures January to October were taken in 2020, December in 2019 and November in 2017 (as I lost  two years of pictures after a technology crash).

I don’t tweak my photographs (eg adjust their colour or contrast) as I think that’s cheating, but I have uprighted them where necessary (as I have a tendency to take wonky pictures). I don't crop them either as a rule but in the calendar they are cropped slightly to make them fit the shape of the pages. What you see below are the uncropped versions.

                                                                    Front cover

Here you can see Frog and Dog (a speck in the distance) walking the towpath of the Grand Western Canal, a Local Nature Reserve a few miles from home. It’s May and the weather is glorious, as it has been ever since the start of Lockdown six weeks earlier, with the sky clearer, the air sweeter and the silence deeper than anything I’d experienced for decades, if ever, in the UK.

See ‘Five on Friday’  

 

January

I was going to include what I thought was a gorgeous picture of a translucent greeny-grey sea but Frog said it was much too gloomy for the start of the calendar. I decided that he was probably right so here instead is a picture of gorse on the same walk.

Even though it was a bleak day there were still splashes of colour, such as catkins and toadstools in the woods and this gorse out on the cliffs.

As the English saying goes, ‘When gorse is out of flower, kissing’s out of fashion’, which means of course, that gorse is always flowering, even in mid-winter, and I have pictures of gorse flowers peaking through snow. We didn’t have any snow this winter however, not even a flurry as far as I can remember.

We’re on the East Devon coast, our nearest seaside and one of our favourite locations for walks (which will become obvious as this calendar progresses).

See ‘Winter into spring’ 

February

This is the River Culm and I’m sitting on a squelchy island which the dog and I have reached across a spit of gravel. We’re in a popular National Trust park (the NT being a charity that protects countryside and historic buildings) and this was the only place I could find to be alone.

I’m transfixed by the rushing water and hoping that the spit will still be there when we want to get back to the mainland. The river is in spate and, if it’s raining upstream, levels could rise quickly.

(We did make it back but one of my feet slipped off the spit and my boot filled with water. Bother.)

See ‘Winter into spring’ 

March

 

This is the lane that runs along the spine of the hill above the house.

All Devon lanes look the same – hedged, twisty, narrow, muddy, up and down – and if you lose concentration when driving it’s easy to become disorientated: ‘Where am I? Where am I going?’ On foot, as I am here, it’s not so bad.

You might also realise as you progress through this calendar that through-routes - roads, footpaths, avenues, canals, rivers – are something of an obsession of mine. (Actually, I didn’t realise it myself until I got to the end.)

April

 

This is a tiny patch of ancient woodland a twenty-minute climb through fields from home. I call it my sanctuary as only a couple of other people (friends and neighbours) visit it and they tend to stick to its other end. So it’s just me here and wild nature, something that’s very hard to find anywhere in the UK.

At bluebell time, like now, the wood is completely magical. Ellie however is immune to magic. She hurtles to and fro chasing squirrels (and getting into my pictures).

See ‘Pointing and shooting’

May

 

Branscombe beach, East Devon.

During the Lockdown we were allowed out once a day for exercise but it wasn’t at all clear whether or not we were allowed to drive somewhere for that exercise. Frog and I had heard on the local television news that so long as your walk was longer than your drive it was OK, so we took that as our mantra, and made the 45-minute drive here on this beautiful day as a birthday celebration, stopping off to do some food shopping as an additional excuse and walking for two hours on the cliffs.

There were few other people around however, which was a treat but not normal and made us wonder what the rules actually were.

June

 

Once more Frog rejected my first picture choice (watermeadows, ruins) as too gloomy but as the weather had now broken it was hard to find a June picture that wasn’t gloomy. This picture of abandoned lime kilns on the Grand Western Canal, on the same walk as that of the rejected picture, makes up for its gloominess with atmosphere (in my opinion – but I haven’t shown it to Frog yet).

We took a new route on this walk and passed a dramatic quarry and dramatic quarry buildings which looked like a Spanish fortress. I would have liked to include in the calendar one of the pictures I took of these but decided they weren't representative of the British countryside - but perhaps they are. Perhaps I should show it as it really is, not just the pretty bits.

See ‘June’s blog party’

July

 

Nor are there any blue skies in my July pictures, so you’ll have to make do with this one, taken from the top of some East Devon cliffs.

It was a long steep climb to get here and when I arrived the sky seemed to be exploding towards me.

The landowner here farms for wildlife, not just 'organically' (without chemicals), and on this walk I saw birds, wildflowers and butterflies I've never seen before.

See ‘Living and learning on the Jurassic Coast’

 

August

 

 
The sun has come out again, it’s hot and I’m sitting on the hill behind the house. Everything glows with colour and light, and I have the sense that this is the summer at its peak.

Although we have a good network of public footpaths in England, there is no 'right to roam' in the countryside except in special places like national parks. One of our farming neighbours however allows me free access to their land and I feel grateful every time I'm out in it, which is most days. I don't think Frog and I would have stayed here so long (40 years) without them.
 

 

September

 

We’re by the sea again here in the 'undercliff’, an area of wilderness created by landslips. It’s only the beginning of the month, but already the wildflowers are disappearing and the berries are taking over.

John Fowles wrote a novel (made into a film in 1981) called The French Lieutenant's Woman and as far as I can remember much of it was set in the undercliff a little further east from where we are here. However, when I took my old copy down from the shelf the print was so tiny I couldn't read it, so I can't tell you any more. Frog and I took a walk there a few weeks later but didn't feel prepared for the full route as it's four hours without exit or access to phone reception and the list of dangers on the noticeboard was daunting.

We’re on our way back after a day out which included a visit to a beach (rendered almost inaccessible due to recent landslip and hence deserted) and what turned out to be our last swim of the year in the sea.
 
See ‘An anniversary day out’

 

October

 

This is another second-choice picture, as the first one – of a disused chapel and graveyard – was again pronounced too gloomy by Himself.

I was feeling gloomy (The season? The worst of virus restrictions without the best? A creative hiatus?) and had resolved to do new things, including returning to the National Trust park which I’d left alone during Lockdown as it had bulged with visitors.

The park was still busy and I walked as quickly as I could the couple of miles to its far side, sitting to eat my sandwich all alone (except for Ellie) in the aforementioned graveyard, propped against a tomb. I thought it was a beautiful peaceful spot, not gloomy at all, and it fed my soul.

This ploughed field and typical Devon view later on in the walk were also healing however, and Frog preferred them. Note Devon’s distinctive red (sandstone) soil.
 
See ‘Autumn feasts’

November

 

 
I’m at the National Trust park again, in a newish avenue (newish in that I remember it being created) which inspires the photographer in me at all seasons.

They say you can tell the age of Devon hedgerows by counting one hundred years for each species of tree in it, and the last one I counted had eight. The trees in the planted row (the one on the left) are all the same - beech, as far as I remember - but the scrubby wood on the right is probably a lot older and therefore better for wildlife, even if less photogenic.
 

December

 

The view south from under a beech tree on the hill behind the house, and Ellie looking wistful.

Behind the line of hills in the distance is the sea. The dip in the line straight ahead is Branscombe, which features in May. To the right (if you could see it) is Dartmoor National Park, and behind is Exmoor National Park (neither of which has found its way into this calendar – another year perhaps).

We’re very lucky to live here. It’s still beautiful.

On Writing

I’m trying not to blog at the moment, or at least not so often, so as to leave space for other writing projects.

In the meantime, here are the concluding paragraphs from On Writing by Stephen King, which I’ve been reading recently. 

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up. Getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book – perhaps too much – has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it – is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
    Drink and be filled up.

Thanks to the delightful Jon from EE for recommending the book.

(We* rang EE to transfer our broadband to them. At the end of a long conversation about houses, dogs, interests, family and occasionally broadband, Jon said that we'd made his day. He certainly made ours.)

*Frog and I make admin phone calls together as I'm the admin person of the family but he hears better than me.

Autumn feasts

A couple of miles from home is a National Trust park. I used to walk there at least once a week, knowing that at worst I would only come across a handful of people, mostly local and people I’d seen before, and that I would almost always find space in the tiny carpark.

    At the start of Lockdown however, people began to swarm to the park, their cars filling the carpark, lining the road and taking over a small wood opposite.

    I didn’t begrudge people the space (much). It’s good that people enjoy nature – good for them and good for the environment - in that the more we appreciate it the more we’ll work to preserve it. But I did stop going there myself both because I like solitude on my walks and because I didn’t want to put myself in the way of infection unnecessarily.

    Numbers have hardly diminished since, but on Wednesday I decided that I would give the place a try. I desperately needed to walk somewhere different. It was part of my new resolve.

I found a parking space without trouble in the small wood but as we walked across the road to the main gate two dogs on leads tried to kill Ellie and then three wildly excited Labradors tried to bowl us over. (Their human companions behaved perfectly.) I soon left the main path therefore and headed for the woods and the network of tiny secret paths I’d mentally mapped over the years.

It was a beautiful still day and I had no goal in mind except to put as much distance as possible between me and the entrance and to spend as long as I could away from home. I was feeling fractured and directionless, and being inside made it worse. 

Out of the woods I passed this peaceful herd.

In spite of what they say about bulls, and cows with calves, in my experience it’s the bullocks you have to watch out for. They career around aimlessly, one minute ignoring you and the next galloping in your direction. It’s as if they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re off their heads, they have no one to tell them how to behave. (Like students, I suppose.) And I feel sorry for them. Groups of mixed ages and sexes are what nature intended, and what works.

A couple of miles further on and I was at the other side of the park. I decided to stop for lunch at this tiny disused chapel which I hadn’t visited for years.

I propped myself against a tomb and took out my tahini sandwich. Ellie busied herself investigating the rough grass for rabbits . . .

and snapping at flies . . .

. . .  before eventually settling down next to me.

As I ate, I thought of the Acland family who once owned the park, whose chapel this had been and whose gravestones were keeping me company. They put their Socialist principles into action and donated their grand house, gardens, parkland and hundreds of acres of farmland to the National Trust, moving to live in a small cottage in a nearby village.

The sun was almost shining, I was utterly alone and all sounds had died away. For some reason I remembered another time nearly fifty years earlier when I was sitting alone in the sun in a peaceful place. I was in the garden of my hall of residence at the end of my first year at university, and frantic with boredom. How different I felt now.

On the way out of the graveyard I passed this ivy, buzzing with wasps and flies. Only ivy produces flowers in quantity at this time of year and it’s a vital source of food for insects, while the black berries feed birds over the winter. I thought of the farmers round home who’ve taken to scalping the hedges in autumn, destroying hips and haws, berries and nuts. No wonder animal species are vanishing. How can farmers be so blind? One day not too far away, humans too might be glad of this wild larder.

The graveyard had been full of toadstools . . .

. . . and now they lined the path as well, hiding in the grass and watching me like gnomes.

Fat shiny acorns littered the ground. It seemed to be a good year for acorns and I hoped the wildlife (dormice? squirrels?) was taking advantaged of them and growing fat and healthy.

I paused at the edge of a field and took yet another photograph of ploughed red soil. I love ploughed fields. I think it's because they remind me of the sea.

We crossed a road and took other paths I vaguely remembered from way back. I had no map with me and wandered free. Ellie however – usually so bossy – was spooked by some frisky cattle, not realising that there was a fence between us and them, so we returned to the road. We crossed the estate drive and saw people queuing (2 metres apart) to get into the house. Poor sods, I thought. I’m not one for stately homes. White elephants more like.

We’d been out for three hours and I was ready to return. I spent the rest of the afternoon in calm, purposeful activity. I hadn’t felt like that for months.

The next day, as I sat in a field recovering from a trip to Sainsbury’s, I realised that what the walk had done was feed my soul. I must do it more often. Thank you National Trust. Thank you Aclands.

Turning something old into something new: a to-do list for October

I am a workaholic. I was brought up to think that the day must be filled with ‘useful’ activities. This of course is anathema to creativity as the best ideas come (to me) when I’m doing something ‘useless’, like lying on the bed resting, walking aimlessly, sitting in the car, watching television.

Recently however I’ve run out of ‘useful’ things to do. I think I might have created this situation deliberately, in an attempt to leave space for new things. That doesn’t however make it any less painful and, as I said to Frog yesterday morning, I feel like I’m stumbling round a dark house.

‘Life’s catching up with you,’ he said.

I liked that. It made sense.

In the meantime, before I regain my sense of direction, I have to fill my days somehow. (Don’t I?) So when I read Kate’s ‘To-do list for October’ (see her blog 'I live, I love, I craft, I am me' ) I thought I’d compile one of my own. I didn’t intend to publish it, but Kate – who’s done so much to keep us all going, through the lockdown - suggested I did ‘so that we can all support each other as we go along’.

So here it is.

Garden/pool

I started off by listing all the jobs that needed doing (eg clear and clean the greenhouse, fetch manure, put winter cover on pool, put garden furniture away) and then I decided that was against the whole spirit of the exercise and nothing like Kate’s inspiring list. So I decided instead to say:

Bed garden and pool down for the winter – lovingly.

Sewing

By now I was better at the exercise so, instead of listing jobs, I decided that for me the purpose of sewing was to have fun. 

Even though I do occasionally follow patterns, like this new one that I’m turning into a purple shirt for Frog . . .

. . . they’re only starting points. I need to remember my first love – making do and mending – turning something old into something new.

I’m also at the moment craving a sewing room – something light and spacious, instead of a darkish corner of my study. Even though I can’t imagine where we’d put one or when we’ll ever be able to afford to build one, there’s no harm in starting to plan what I’d like.

 

Writing

Here, I listed my aims, which are:

-To change the direction of this blog. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I want to dig deeper.

-To continue with my Secret Blog. This is something I’m writing just for me. At the moment it’s what you could call a ‘stream of negative consciousness’ but I’m letting it go where it will in the hope that it turns into something.

-To keep alert to stories, so that I can start a New Novel.

In my experience stories come to you; you can’t go looking for them. As Stephen King says in his hilarious On Writing which I’m reading at the moment (more about that another time, perhaps):

‘There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.’

-To build my confidence. Confidence creates ideas. Lack of confidence kills them.

For the last two years I’ve been working hard with affirmations, under the guidance of the wonderful Louise Hay and her book You Can Heal Your Life.

But, as Frog pointed out recently, affirmations are just a starting point. You have to then put them into practice as this makes them real and proves them and gives you confidence in them, and creates a benign circle so that you carry on healing. So between us we decided that I could do something every day that’s new or scares me. Hence this post, I suppose!

 

Dog-walking

Because I do the main dog-walk mid-morning, I’m usually hungry and longing to get back for my lunch. Consequently I don’t always walk as far as both Ellie and I might like. I could change this routine.

Even though Frog and I have been adventurous recently, trying new walks when we go out, at home (when it’s just me and Ellie) I’m limited, but perhaps I could make small changes, such as doing walks backwards.

In other words, I can turn dogwalking from a chore to something new and confidence-boosting.

 

Cooking

I used to enjoy cooking supper because I combined it with my daily glass of wine. Since early August however I’ve cut alcohol out of my life, partly because it just wasn’t agreeing with me (however little I had) and I was feeling slightly jaded all the time (not to mention getting far too many migraines) and partly because I decided that blurring the edges of my life wasn’t helpful at the moment. I was following the ethos of my parents – work hard, drink hard and don’t think too much – but it wasn’t mine.

Now, I have to enjoy cooking for itself which I don’t particularly but I do enjoy eating and creating healthy food for Frog and me, so I decided to see cooking as time filled with something productive (I’m trying not to say ‘useful’) instead of time wasted. Another chore that I can turn into a pleasure.

 

Sorry about all this woffle. This post is something new for me, and I’ve let my thoughts and feelings run instead of marshalling them with my usual rigour. Thank you for reading it, and I hope that in some tiny way it might have helped you, or at least echoed something you feel yourself.

I realise too that I haven’t mentioned anything about autumn or the Lockdown (which featured in Kate’s list). But they do come into it. Another time perhaps.